To be fair...
To be fair to Microsoft's customer services, I was blighted with a dodgy DVD drive that refused to read anything other than audio CD's and when I spoke to the woman on the phone she was very helpful. I patiently tried the one or two things she suggested (that I knew wouldn't work cos I'd done them, but patience is a virtue after all) and then she took my details and e-mailed me my postage thingy, warning me it'd take 2 odd weeks to come back.
Fine, so I took it down the couriers (i work in london, so no biggie for me) and less than a week later, the thing was back. Maybe I've been lucky, but that seems like pretty good customer service to me.
They're not all eejits either. When I mentioned to the first rep I dealt with that I'd got it 2nd hand, but had the receipts and it was still in warranty (apparently means I can't get warranty repair), he did a quick check, told me that technically I wasn't supposed to get the free repair, but the previous owner hadn't registered it so if i called back and pretended it was mine all along, it'd be fine since they'd have no way of knowing. Now that is excellent customer service!
I'll restate, i'm no MS fanboy, I hate IE and it's strange implementations of W3 standards. I use firefox, thunderbird and Open Office. MS bashing is easy to do, so I thought I'd just share my (rather positive) experience with a company I normally approach with caution.